Zing Blog by ZingWiz

I’m starting this blog with some big news from Adobe. They have announced a “team up” with search leader Google for improving the spidering of dynamic web content and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), including Flash’s .swf file format. Adobe Press Release Here. Yahoo has plans for furture support also.

This is a huge deal from an SEO and design standpoint. Flash has been conscidered “Accessible” by screen readers for some time now (starting with the release of Flash Player 6 in 2002), but the serch engines have been slow to develop a way to search and index flash content (don’t ask me why).  This is one of the major factors keeping Flash from completely taking over the web (that, and the fact that Flash is not very intuitive).

If you had a website that was 100% flash, chances are people wouldn’t be finding you through a web search. This is OK if you have the $$ to back it up with a media blitz, but terrible if you depend on organic/natural traffic.

Flash still can be a bit trickey if the whole site is in one file, because Google still doesn’t have a way to link directly to a relevent page (as far as I can tell). But if the site is HTML with Flash embeleshments, or entirely flash, but with seperate html files for each embeded page, then the results Google gives us will be more accurate.

From a fontahollic standpoint this anoncement from Adobe is cool because designers can now use flash to embed sections of accessible fancy text (like headlines,etc) that will appear the same on all computers with the Flash plugin (98% of computers on internet), and wont sacrifice their Search Engine Friendlienes (SEF).

This has been able to be done for a few years now using a sneaky, and surprisingly not very widely used method (correct me if I’m wrong) called sIFR, which uses Flash, JavaScript and CSS all mashed up together with a pinch of Oregano and a sprig of mint. Needless to say, just making a little Flash file and dropping it in will be nice.

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